


When You Wish Upon A Star

by Serie11



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Game: Kingdom Hearts III, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Internal Monologue, Melancholy, Memories, Multi, Regrets, SoRiKai Week 2020, The Final World (Kingdom Hearts), Wishes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:40:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25793011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serie11/pseuds/Serie11
Summary: Sora, the Final World, endless copies of himself, and endless time to finally, finally, think.Sorikai week day 6:Reunion|Wish
Relationships: Pre Kairi/Riku/Sora (Kingdom Hearts)
Kudos: 19
Collections: Sorikai Week





	When You Wish Upon A Star

It’s lonely here. 

The copies of himself don’t talk, only move through their repeated motions, again and again and again. The twinkles of light that form into stars in the corner of his eyes don’t talk – not like he and Chirithy can. They tell him their stories in hushed whispers that scratch at the back of his mind. He doesn’t listen to their stories – he remembers them, memories pressed into his head. 

The stars drag at him, make him heavier. He thinks that hearing them out is tying him ever more irrevocably to this world, but he feels how they are relieved by sharing their final thoughts with someone else, and doesn’t stop. As he touches his flitting copies there is always that push and press of souls that don’t quite connect with him, leaving him heavier and sadder and more regretful, and them lightened ever so slightly. He cannot take all of their burdens from them, not when they have hung on for so long that hanging on is all they are anymore, not when they are waiting for someone who he isn’t. 

He wishes that some of their dying thoughts weren’t so achingly familiar. 

Naminé, of course, is different even here – she has a voice to speak with, and with her death so recent, she has not sunken into the lassitude that the other stars have. Still, talking with her leaves him feeling raw and vulnerable. She’s proof, more than the copies of himself that are running around, that everything has ended. That his world, his friends, are broken. 

Chirithy had called them pieces – he wants to say that they’re fragments. He recognises most of the actions that they’re performing, the way he runs, the way he glides, the way he fights, rolls, stands, stretches, dodges. Maybe it’s because he’s had to fight, for so long – maybe it’s because he has been stretched and squished into his own body, but not his own, so many times, that he’s aware of it at all. An endless trail, that he is still travelling down. 

He doesn’t know how long he spends in the world of ocean and sky, but slowly, eventually, even he has to admit that he cannot possibly collect them all. It’s like a never ending stream – every time he turns a corner, tilts the world a different way, there are multitudes more of them, and Sora can tell how spending time here is seeding the possibility of _staying_ here, how every fragment of himself he collects draws him back closer to the waking world. He dares not resist that call, not when he thinks his willpower is the only thing keeping him awake and aware and held together. If every speck of his being was not calling out to return to his loved ones, he suspects that he might just fall apart. 

The Final World is very good at what it does, he thinks. Those nameless stars had all only been one fragment of a person, the strongest regret, the strongest wish. All other parts have been stripped away, and even those wishes would one day be gone as well. Nothing lasts forever, and this place is an empty eternity. 

There’s one fragment he finds, all by itself, crouched and low and keeping most of itself hidden against the wall as it peers around the corner. It’s so still that Sora almost trips when he stops by it, crouching himself to get a better look at it. 

Most of the fragments are smiling – he likes that, likes that his life has been filled with so much joy. This one isn’t. This Sora has a fixed expression like nothing he has ever seen before, eyes slightly wide, lips parted ever so slightly and moving just enough with its breath, so he knows this one is on repeat too. Unlike a lot of the others, he doesn’t know when this one could have happened – it feels strange, to look at it and think _this is me._ The fearful, wary look, the pose, so ready to spring into action, the way a single hand is clenched tightly into a fist. 

He cannot pick up all his pieces. He waits for longer than he probably should, before clasping its hand. The fragment disappears just like all the rest, and he feels nothing. 

He moves on. 

Another star whispers to him, _why didn’t I tell him how I feel?_ and a few fragments later he remembers _I wish I could have held her, just once._ He is crying, suddenly, and has to stop in his desperate sprint, hands on his knees, refusing to curl into a ball. He is growing heavier. There will never be enough time, but he should not waste what he has left. 

_Why didn’t I even try? I wanted it, but I was too scared. Why did that stop me?_

He spins around pillars and wishes that Kairi were here – he jumps between walls, and misses Riku. Even while he is finding parts of himself, he is losing others, until he can barely think, regrets boiling and frothing inside him. Losing Kairi. Letting Riku go to his death alone. Not being able to save Roxas or Naminé. Doing nothing while the Worlds fall. And even further back, losing to Xehanort in the dreamscape. Telling Kairi to stay behind. Hiding how he felt, for so long. Not giving Riku or Kairi as many kisses as they deserved. 

_I have to wait for him, one last time. He would wait for me, wouldn’t he?_

This place is good at bringing out all encompassing sorrow, and he wonders if that is another method it uses to help dissipate souls. If they feel nothing but endless, relentless sadness, he cannot blame them for falling into the void. But he has a body. He has a goal. He must keep going. 

_When will she join me? Will she ever come? Was she ever coming?_

He glides down a string of fragments and lets the whispers that are-and-are-not voices settle into the back of his mind. Even with so many new thoughts and wishes coming at him, he is still alone. These are not people any more, not like he still is. They can speak to him, but he cannot speak back. They are too wrapped up in their single thought, their burning aches and regrets and desires, to even notice him. They share because he is there, and the only thing they are is broadcasting their wishes to the empty sky. 

He wonders his name is _Sora_ just for this moment, shadows and echoes stretched out among the endless clouds in the sky. 

He circles a pillar, stepping through and claiming more fragments of his lost self, and stops. 

He feels dizzy all of a sudden, head fuzzy and thoughts syrupy-thick. He’s kneeling, he realises. It’s time for him to leave. He’s more real than not, now, his body filled in with colour and form, imprinting his presence on the surroundings. 

Still, nothing happens. _Does anything happen here, ever?_ he thinks, and puts his hands down upon the mirror ocean. _Kairi,_ a traitorous thought sounds. The ocean under his hands. He missed out on that, too. 

_I never really told her how I feel._

“I told her,” Sora tries to say. That day, under the fading sun, with fruit in his hands. She has to have known, right? That the only thing he wants is her safety, and for her to be by his side. But he never said those words. He never said _I love you._

_I let him feel like he wasn’t important to me._

“He knows,” Sora gulps, gasping for air that he suddenly needs to breathe. When did he stop breathing? When did this place take even that from him? “Riku has always been by my side, or I’ve always been searching for him, and he was always searching for me.” Riku knows that he is important to Sora. He has to know, right?

_I never told him. I never told either of them, not really._

He _is_ scared. That how he felt wasn’t how they felt. That they wouldn’t see him as important to them as they are to him. That they don’t feel the same, all consuming, soul deep dedication that he does. 

But this is a place of endings, of finality, and he is no longer alive to fix any of his mistakes going forward. It’s crushing, all of the weight that he has been feeling fathering falling upon him in that second. It wants him to fall apart, to fly to pieces and become another starry figure, that can only bleed its regrets into the sky, until even those too fall silent too. 

“No,” he says. “I’m still here. I can still go back. I can still change things.” He forces himself to breathe in, to stand even though it feels like his legs are going to crack under the strain. They won’t, he tells himself. Nothing is quite real here, and if his willpower is strong enough, it can keep him going. He just needs to keep going. He closes his eyes, and _feels_ , the energy of this place, the endingness of it. Truly, it doesn’t care if he stays or if he goes. It is too old, too large, for something as small as him to matter. That’s why he can even escape at all. If he ever got its attention, he would splinter apart from the sheer impact of it. 

“It’s a wish,” he says, because saying it will make it real, distinguish it from the shadows of stars surrounding him. “I want to see them again. A vow. We’ll meet again one day, I just know we will. And then I’ll tell them everything. Everything that really, really matters.” 

There is no answer, but he hardly expected one. Sora looks down at his hands, solid and real again, and looks up to the sky. The weight – maybe he’s been thinking about it wrong, all this time. If this place is the sky, then maybe he doesn’t need to go up or around or through it to leave. He stretches his arms out, repeats his wish quietly to himself. It’s not a regret. He is not one of the stars that are stuck here, unchanging. He can move forward, and change his future. 

“I’m coming,” Sora promises, and falls. 


End file.
